Transplanting a hair from one region of a person's body to another region of the body is frequently done to add hair to the other region that may not have any hair or may have a small amount of hair. To make the transplanted hair and its new location look as natural as possible, the hair that is transplanted should be viable when it is sown at the new location. To do this successfully one must extract the hair's follicle from its position in the skin and then transport the follicle to the transplant location.
Because a hair's follicle is small, a typical transplant procedure includes transplanting many individual hairs. And because a hair's follicle is fragile, one must take care during the transplant procedure to not damage the follicle. A common way to protect and keep an extracted follicle viable is to keep the follicle bathed in saline solution until the follicle is sown at the new location. Thus, one could transplant many hairs to a new location by extracting, transporting and then sowing, individually, each hair before extracting the next hair. This process could increase the viability of each hair by reducing the amount of time that each follicle spends separated from skin, but the time that it would take to perform such a procedure would be very long; more than most people have to spend on such a procedure.
To reduce the time spent transplanting many hairs to a new location, many procedures involve extracting all or many hairs before sowing the hairs at the new location. To help keep the extracted hairs viable until they are sown, the hairs are typically transported from the extraction tool to a receptacle containing saline solution, via a tube. Then, when one is ready to sow the hair at the new location, one separates the hair follicles from the saline solution and sows them. Unfortunately, many hair follicles are damaged as they travel through the tube into the receptacle. And, such damage often reduces the viability of the hair follicle at the new location.